Blog number 213 02 September 2008
Reading a book called, Iwo Jima in Barnes and Noble's this morning. Found a bit of trivia. That flag that was raised on Mount Suribachi, that is so famous? It has a bullet hole in the second stripe.
The way it happened was that the guys were so short of people because of their casualties that they were waiting for replacements, so they dug in and slept right by that flag. The guy telling the story heard noises during the night, and thinking it was Japs, he fired at the noise, found out that the noise was the flag flapping in the wind.
There is an asterisk by the word, "Japs" in this book. The asterisk's explanation for existing is that "Jap" was commonly used during the Good War, but the proper word is, of course, "Japanese." I thought that curious because I, myself have used the word, "Jap" in my blog, with the explanation that that is what we called them during WW 2.
I was a little nervous using that word when responding to Maryanne's comment on one of my entries, because her mother is Japanese, but I expected that she would understand I didn't mean anything derogatory to the Japanese. It's just the way I think of the WW 2 Japs, that's all.
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5 comments:
Well... I do understand the context and it doesn't bother me.
I don't think of myself as Japanese. I'm an American. I don't believe in "hyphenated" Americans.
But, it's kind of like calling Black people N***** when refering to them in a historical context.
I'm not Japanese, so... whatever.
Also, I think the Japanese military was brutal and scary evil. My mother agrees.
Hi Maryanne!
I guess I kinda figured that one carried the old country's nomenclature with them, but thinking on it, I never think of myself as Irish. Which means, I guess, that I should do more pondering.
I think it's a bit different with the Japanese, they were the enemy in a war that cost so many lives.
It gets kind of tricky for me sometimes, sorting out the American-Japanese thing.
I wonder if it's the same for German-Americans?
Maryanne;
I think it it is not so blatent with the German-American thing, but I think a lot of that is because of the Caucasian-Oriental thing. After all, Orientals are inscrutable, you know.
In this Stilwell book he mentions that the Chinese had this philosophy, "Do nothing and things will get done." In fact, he saw posters that only said, "Do nothing" and the populace was left to fill in the rest. He told what the Chinese words are for "do nothing" "we wie," soemthing like that.
The Chinese did practically nothing during the Good War except to collect lend lease and hide it. Mostly, Stilwell thinks, because of that philosophy. They never thought in terms of offense, only defense, and their idea of defense was to retreat back to where there was no enemy.
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